I take Amtrak when I travel between Richmond and Alexandria on the weekends. Oz picks me up (and drives me around) in Richmond. Transportation in Alexandria is a little more involved. I walk from the office over to the Amtrak station on Fridays to catch a train home. Very convenient. Sunday evenings, since the bus to my apartment stops running at six o'clock and my car is at my apartment, I get a cab at the train station or, if there are no cabs there, then I can usually find one in front of the King Street metro station right around the corner.
Tonight there were no cabs at the train station, but there were a few by the metro.
I mentioned this to the cabbie and asked if a train had come through right before mine (dropping off passengers who took all the cabs).
"No, it's Ramadan. Everyone's gone home. You're my last fare," the cabbie told me. "I'm going home once I drop you off." Most of the cab drivers around here are from South/Central Asia or the Middle East.
I looked out the window, marking the pink clouds and long shadows. "Home by sundown?"
I hope my Sunday evening train runs on time for the next few weeks. Even so, it'll be a near thing in a few weeks (the sun sets a minute or two earlier each day). And now I'm thinking, if you can never get a cab in the rain, imagine how much worse it would be on a rainy evening during Ramadan.
This product packed by weight, not volume …
Yeah, right.
A while back I got a pretty kitchen scale, mostly for measuring out dry pasta. The accuracy of my estimates of how much dry pasta equals a reasonable serving size are inversely proportional to my blood sugar at the time of making said estimates. The scale does not have this problem.
I usually buy pasta in one pound boxes or bags. I used to get the kind that was 95 cents a pound, back before the big price run-up in 2008. Then I started getting whatever was on sale.
Before the price run-up, I was impressed at how exactly the pasta was measured into the boxes, down to a few hundredths of an ounce.
After the prices started to go up and stay up, I was impressed at how I was getting consistently shorted a half ounce by Barilla and San Giorgio. Really, if they have to charge 40% more now than they did twelve months ago, okay. (The wages they pay their employees have gone up 40%, right?) But they could at least put the whole pound of pasta in the one pound box.
Does Virginia still have a Bureau of Weights and Measures? Or did that get shut down along with all the rest areas on I-95?
The last time I was in the store, I got Richfood pasta (generic), because it happened to be the cheapest. Richfood has impressed me by throwing an extra half ounce of pasta in the box.
Yay for store brand! A better value in more ways than one!